Russia-Ukraine live updates: Red Cross renews Mariupol evacuation push; Russian pullback reported near Kyiv

Ukrainian photojournalist Maksym Levin was found dead on the northern outskirts of the capital, Kyiv, the country’s prosecutor general said Saturday. He is at least the sixth journalist killed covering Russia’s war on Ukraine.

A statement from the prosecutor general’s office on Telegram said an investigation was underway into Levin’s death, whom colleagues and friends called Max.

Reporters Without Borders said friends lost contact with Levin — who had worked for organizations including Reuters, the Associated Press, the BBC and the Ukrainian outlet Hromadske — when he disappeared in March around Vyshhorod, near Kyiv, while reporting in the combat zone. “He was unarmed and wearing a press jacket,” the media advocacy group said. “Targeting journalists is a war crime.”

Tributes for Levin poured in Saturday from colleagues who shared his work on social media. “He talked about peace more than war,” journalist Christopher Miller wrote. “He was brave, talented, and dedicated to covering this story.”

Ukrainian online media outlet LB.ua, where he had also worked, said the 40-year-old Levin is survived by four young sons, as well as his wife and parents, and had dreamed of being a photographer since age 15. It added that Levin, who had covered the conflict with Russian-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine since 2014 once said, “Every Ukrainian photographer dreams of taking a photo that will stop the war.”

The Washington Post could not immediately verify the circumstances of his death independently. The prosecutor general’s office accused Russian forces of firing the shots that killed Levin, but it did not provide further details. Hromadske said intense fighting later erupted in the district he went to cover.

The Kremlin had banked on a quick, trouble-free decapitation to solve the problem of a neighbor appearing to stray too far from Moscow’s orbit. But after its vaunted army thundered across the border, very little went according to plan.

The invading troops met fierce resistance from outgunned fighters defending their homeland. International allies, including the United States, rushed to aid the underdogs. And a war that Moscow had seen as a chance to show off its might became instead a bloody and embarrassing display of weakness — one that threatened the stability of its deeply entrenched regime.

So has gone Russia’s stumbling, five-week-old invasion of Ukraine. But the same description applies to the Soviet Union’s ill-fated adventure in Afghanistan, which precipitated collapse at home and the Cold War’s end.

Now the history of that four-decade-old conflict looms over Russian President Vladimir Putin’s decision-making as he tries to navigate a self-inflicted quagmire. Veterans of the Afghanistan war say he has already failed to heed some of its most critical lessons, notably by overestimating his military’s capabilities and misjudging his adversaries.

“The Russians underestimated the Afghans in the 1980s,” said Bruce Riedel, who worked on the CIA’s covert program to aid the rebels. “They seem to have underestimated the Ukrainians today.”

The International Committee of the Red Cross said it is making fresh attempts to enter the besieged port city of Mariupol on Saturday, after failed efforts since a humanitarian cease-fire was declared in the region earlier this week.

“Our team is on the move this morning from Zaporizhzhia to Mariupol,” ICRC spokesman Ewan Watson told The Washington Post by email. “I’m not able to give further information at this stage.”

On Friday, an ICRC team of three vehicles and nine personnel was unable to reach Mariupol due to “impossible” conditions, the agency said. It added that it was “critical” for the ICRC to have security guarantees before it could facilitate the safe passage of civilians from Mariupol to “another city in Ukraine.”

Despite the ICRC’s struggle to accompany evacuation convoys, people are still exiting the battered southern city. About 3,000 left Friday, according to Ukrainian officials, some of whom remained relatively optimistic. “I think that today or maybe tomorrow we will hear good news regarding the evacuation of the inhabitants of Mariupol,” presidential adviser Oleksiy Arestovych told Ukrainian television Saturday.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said in a video address Saturday morning that he hopes for a “solution” to the crisis in Mariupol. “Europe has no right to react in silence to what is happening in our Mariupol. The whole world must react to this humanitarian catastrophe,” he said.

Across Ukraine, seven humanitarian corridors have been agreed for Saturday, according to Ukrainian Deputy Prime Minister Iryna Vereshchuk, including one from Mariupol. She said in a Telegram post that more than 6,000 people were evacuated from front-line cities to other parts of the country on Friday.

Vereshchuk said Friday’s evacuees included more than 1,400 people who left in their vehicles along planned routes from the southern cities of Berdyansk and Melitopol, which are under Russian control, to the Zaporizhzhia region. Among them were hundreds of people from Mariupol who had managed to escape in private vehicles. Separately, she said, a convoy of 42 buses carried Mariupol residents to Zaporizhzhia from Berdyansk, which they had previously reached on their own.

Tens of thousands of people in recent weeks have fled Ukrainian cities under attack by Russian forces after Kyiv and Moscow agreed on fragile evacuation deals.

Beijing on Saturday renewed its criticism of sanctions placed on Russia and said it was not deliberately circumventing them, a day after a high-level virtual summit between China and the European Union.

“We oppose sanctions, and the effects of these sanctions also risk spilling to the rest of the world,” Wang Lutong, director general of European affairs at China’s Foreign Ministry, told reporters Saturday.

Since Russian forces invaded Ukraine in late February, E.U. leaders have taken a tougher stance on China, urging it to drop its tacit support for the invasion and work for peace — but Beijing is pushing back.

“China is not a related party on the crisis of Ukraine. We don’t think our normal trade with any other country should be affected,” Wang said. He added that China is contributing to the global economy by conducting normal trade with Russia.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has also upended Europe’s post-Cold War security architecture and forced the European Union to rethink its relationship with authoritarian regimes.

“We called on China to end the war in Ukraine,” European Council President Charles Michel told reporters in Brussels on Friday after the summit. “China cannot turn a blind eye to Russia’s violation of international law.”

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said in a statement that the Russian invasion is “not only a defining moment for our continent, but also for our relationship with the rest of the world.”

As recently as eight weeks ago, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban was cozying up to Russian President Vladimir Putin in Moscow, trading quips at a joint news conference and defending Russia’s security demands as “normal.”

“I have good hopes that for many [upcoming] years we can work together,” Orban said, standing next to Putin, in what by his count was their 12th meeting.

In the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, it has quickly become dangerous to have a warm relationship with Putin — and a legion of European populist conservatives has been left chastened and weakened as a consequence.

But Orban is an exception. He has angered his neighbors and triggered harsh blowback from Ukrainian leaders for what they see as a wishy-washy reaction to the war. Yet by portraying himself domestically as a steady hand navigating between larger world powers, he has gained ground on the political opposition in Hungary and increased his odds of winning a fourth consecutive term as prime minister in a parliamentary election Sunday.

Pope Francis said Saturday that he is considering making a trip to Kyiv, the capital of war-battered Ukraine.

While traveling from Rome to Malta, the leader of the Roman Catholic Church was asked by a reporter on board his plane whether a visit to Ukraine was a possibility following invitations from Ukrainian political and religious officials. Francis answered: “Yes, it is on the table,” but he offered no further details, according to Reuters.

Francis, 85, landed in Malta on Saturday for a two-day visit to the predominantly Catholic island nation in southern Europe. He urged Malta to do more to help refugees crossing the Mediterranean from North Africa and the Middle East.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has spoken twice with the pope by telephone, according to the Vatican, and along with Kyiv mayor Vitali Klitschko has extended invitations to Francis to visit Ukraine. The country has a sizable Roman Catholic population. However, most Ukrainian Catholics identify with the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, an Eastern rite church that follows some traditions of Orthodox Christianity but is in “full communion with the Vatican,” according to the Pew Research Center.

Francis has vocally condemned the war in Ukraine, calling it a “senseless massacre where every day slaughters and atrocities are being repeated.” He has also called on all parties to negotiate seriously for peace.

White House press secretary Jen Psaki sought Friday to keep the focus on Russia’s aggression following claims by Moscow that Ukraine had attacked a Russian fuel depot.

Russian officials have accused Ukraine of carrying out a helicopter attack against the depot in Belgorod, a city about 25 miles north of the Ukrainian border. The Ukrainian Defense Ministry said it would “neither confirm nor deny” the attack on Russian territory.

“We have seen those reports,” Psaki said Friday. “We’re not in a position to comment on the Kremlin’s statements. I would note Ukraine has not made any statements or confirmation of these reports.”

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said the incident, days after Ukrainian negotiators offered their Russian counterparts a detailed peace proposal, was “certainly” an escalation.

But Psaki kept the focus on Russia, blaming President Vladimir Putin for the war.

“This is a war that President Putin started — a brutal war with Russia’s forces continuing to bombard cities across Ukraine and commit terrible acts of violence,” Psaki said. “We’ve seen the people of Ukraine fight valiantly in the face of unprovoked Russian brutality.”

“But there is one aggressor here: and that is President Putin and the Russian military at his direction,” she added.

Hitting a fuel depot is not unprecedented. Russia has targeted Ukrainian fuel depots in multiple strikes, including one last month in the western Ukrainian city of Lviv while President Biden was visiting neighboring Poland.

The death toll from a missile strike that hit a main government building in the city of Mykolaiv this week has risen to 32, the governor of the southern Ukrainian region, Vitaliy Kim, said Saturday on Telegram.

Dozens of people remain unaccounted for after Tuesday’s attack blasted a hole through part of the building, Dmytro Pletenchuk, a press officer of the Mykolaiv Regional State Administration, said earlier. More than 30 people were injured, he said as rescue workers continued to clear rubble Friday and funerals were held for many of the victims.

Since Russian forces seized the nearby southeastern port of Kherson, they have not advanced westward past Mykolaiv. Ukrainian forces there have managed to ward off a potential offensive on the key port of Odessa, but interviews in the front-line city where bodies have piled up illustrate the heavy price.

Isabelle Khurshudyan and David L. Stern contributed to this report.